The tension between the urge to find grounds on which wage labor could be fair and the seemingly insoluble problem of the incommensurability between labor and the wage points to a possible explanation for the historical pattern described over the last three chapters. The pattern, to reiterate, is the tendency for increases in productivity to be converted into higher real wages rather than more free time and for those wages to be used to accumulate a greater number of commodities than seems reasonable given constraints on their use imposed by limitations of time. That tendency begins to make more sense in the context of an ongoing efort on the part of wage earners to make the wage commensurable with work (such that a kind of commensuration, therefore fairness, could at least seem to be achievable). Labor becomes commensurable with the wage to the degree that wage goods come to index (to use a Marxian image) congealed durations of time-in-use—that is, free activities that hypothetically could be undertaken by wage earners and so serve to counterbalance the unfree activity represented by work. In accumulating commodities, and, in particular, consumer durables, consumers accumulate envisaged, or virtual, free time. The wage, which, prima facie, is not commensurable with the labor given up for it, comes to represent an exchange of roughly equivalent substances by virtue of being converted into objects that index potential free time. In Marxian terms, labor power is given up in exchange for the use power (we could also say “leisure power” or “activity power”) indexed by accumulated commodities.
When commodities are construed as hypothetical durations of free activity, a fair trade-of between time and commodities becomes thinkable, because commodities become, in essence, stores of potential free time. To the extent that this approach to wage goods takes hold, we would expect wage workers to be at least indiferent to whether increases in productivity are realized as more free time or higher real wages. Given the tendency of businesses to prefer to turn improved productivity into increased output rather than a lower wage bill, the pattern evident in the US economy from the 1920s onward (and also, to varying degrees, elsewhere under advanced industrial capitalism) thus begins to make more sense.
Of course, as objects are accumulated with no increase in free time, it is increasingly dificult to realize their use value—time does not in reality expand as commodity objects are acquired. But once things come to index hypothetical free activity, the possibility of commensuration between labor and wage becomes plausible, insofar as the wage can be used to accumulate free-time indexing objects. By spending the wage on goods that are framed as reserves of free activity, wage earners come to have some sense of having achieved (or at least of being in the process of achieving) fair compensation for their labor.10 Moreover, when commodities represent standing reserves of potential utility, to be drawn on in a time frame extending indefinitely into the future, it becomes easier for consumers to ignore the decreasing amount of time they have in the present in which to actually realize the use value of the commodities they own.
A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration
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